Southern Decadence in New Orleans by Howard Philips Smith and Frank Perez (review)

One of the nation's premier LGBT + events, Southern Decadence, draws more than two hundred thousand people to New Orleans in late summer for days of parties, drinking, and assorted bacchanalian rites, all culminating in a massive parade. Second only to Mardi Gras, the event is big business, drawing millions of dollars into the local economy. But Howard Philips Smith and Frank Perez explain that in its beginning Southern Decadence was not the sprawling affair that it has become. Nor was it embraced by most people in the city. Nor was it an event specifically rooted in queer identity. How Southern Decadence became all these things is the story the authors tell here.

Southern Decadence in New Orleans chronicles the emergence and transformation of the celebration from its beginnings in 1972. One of the chief values of this book is its recovery of the early history of the event. The authors show how its evolution was driven by broader forces in New Orleans, including economic and urban development, the changing status of gay and lesbian New Orleanians, the AIDS crisis, and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

The book is eclectic and unconventional, both more and less than a full, scholarly history of Southern Decadence. It begins with a discussion of the theme of decadence, which serves—inconsistently—as a thesis for the material that follows. The first chapter, sometimes frustratingly impressionistic, surveys decadence in New Orleans (and other parts of the United States) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It begins and ends with an evocation of Coleridge's Pleasure Dome from "Kubla Khan," and it includes descriptions of New Orleans from writers such as Lafcadio Hearn and John Kennedy Toole. One finds here familiar tropes of the city and "its allure, its opulence amid decay" (8). But readers will not see the kind of scholarly foundation for a book that they might expect. Still, a real value of the introduction is to insist on decadence, freedom, and experimentation as the real groundings of an event that is now widely seen as fundamentally about gay identity.

Commemorations and parades in the Deep South, as in the rest of the United States, have always involved questions of power, legitimacy, and acceptance. Despite the easygoing reputation of New Orleans, one can overstate the city's tolerance of gays and lesbians in the early years of Southern Decadence. Appearing on the streets in drag could be dangerous; gay bars were periodically raided and shaken down by police for protection; and moralizing preachers attempted to mobilize public opinion and city authorities against expressions of queer sexuality. This is the context, the authors show, out of which Southern Decadence grew.

The book consists of a lengthy introduction, ten main chapters, scores of pages of interviews, reproductions of early event invitations, and a listing of annual parades and grand marshals. One reads pages of reference-like entries in which the authors give the names of bars and other locations at which fundraisers were held, as well as the specific amounts of money generated by these events. One struggles to keep the names and places straight, and it is difficult to find any sort of thesis or organizing principle here, other than a strictly chronological one. Still, much of the value of the book, which provides primary sources on the early days and evolution of Southern Decadence, lies in its preservation of names, places, and dates that might otherwise soon be lost. Like Carnival, Southern Decadence has a season; months of planning, parties, and fundraising precede the main event. Chapters on the 2016 event bookend the main portion of the book. The first of those two chapters minutely documents the day-to-day planning and execution of the annual festival. Subsequent chapters examine the broader history of gay life in the French Quarter, the long-standing ties of Southern Decadence to the city's gay bars, the devastation wreaked...